Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Though she hadn’t found the freedom or courage to join in the dance, she had lost a dozen layers of inhibition from merely observing Jesus’s liberated worship. Gladys was too overwhelmed by the presence of Jesus next to her, and the elation of the worship time, to even notice that the pastor was preaching. If you had asked her, she might also have said that there were no announcements from the pulpit that week.

  If Gladys hadn’t been so enamored with Jesus’s display there that day, she would probably have noticed how often Jim Heskett looked her direction, as he preached. Indeed, he was only looking in her direction in the general sense, because he looked as often at the empty chairs on either side of Gladys, as he did at Gladys herself.

  Did he hope to catch a glimpse of Gladys’s miraculous epiphany? Did he hope to detect some proof in the chairs, or on her face, that Jesus really was visible and audible to her? If so, he was at least partially satisfied. To Jim, the look of drunken infatuation on Gladys’s face either evidenced some pre-service drinking or a more lofty and inspiring cause. This, in fact, was a strong contributing factor to his inability to stop casting his eyes in Gladys’s direction, even as he attempted to deliver one of the most important sermons of the year.

  Jim Heskett had always been a good preacher, since his earliest attempts in college and seminary. His natural grace with words, his genuine inflection, and obvious internal conviction about what he was saying, inspired admiration and even some motivation to change, both for his congregation in Union City, and in the smaller church he had previously pastored in Iowa.

  His wife, Charlotte, one of the greatest fans of his preaching, was concerned that Sunday by a feeling that Jim was distracted. She even found a plausible excuse to turn her head in the direction he kept looking, to discover who was attracting so much of her husband’s attention. His preoccupation with that particular part of the congregation tempted his wife to wonder whether he had found an attractive woman who had caught his eye. She speculated that someone he already knew had surprised him by turning up in church. But, when she turned her head to the side, to delicately blow her nose in a tissue, she glanced toward Gladys, and could see no likely rivals for her husband’s affections. That left her wondering what it was about Gladys Hight that was distracting Jim, for he hadn’t told her the remarkable story he had heard from Gladys. That this was the case, testifies to the deeply unsettling impact of the news on him. Generally, Jim told Charlotte everything, especially important things. Perhaps the notion of Jesus appearing to one of his congregants overshot even the category of important things.

  At the end of the sermon, not one that thrilled anyone present—for reasons most couldn’t explain—Jim retreated from the pulpit so the worship leader could conclude the service with a repeat of one of the more rousing songs from earlier in the morning. When Gladys looked at Jesus, expecting him to step to the aisle and begin his dance, he surprised her again. Instead of stepping away from her, he stepped closer and put his arm around her, as they stood with the congregation, singing praise and worship. Though her reaction was not as visible, this warm closeness with Jesus thrilled Gladys as much as his energetic dance.

  By the end of that service, Gladys was truly full. She was full of wonder at the vitality of the invisible man that she could, nevertheless, see. She was full of the love he shared with her, always attentive, always staying by her side. She never had a better Palm Sunday service in all her life.

  But Jesus wasn’t finished. He had decided to follow up on that place-holder he had setup the night before. “Gladdy,” he said into her ear, just before Jim concluded the closing prayer. “I want you to give Jim a message from me.”

  Gladys turned her head slightly, Jesus’s face really too close for comfortable eye contact. “You want me to do that this morning?” she muttered as she would have to Harry, if he were whispering instructions into her ear.

  Jesus leaned away a few inches so Gladys could see his face. Now it was serious, and she could tell that the answer to her question was “yes.”

  Of course, Jesus knew as well as Gladys, that getting a chance to say something to the pastor on a crowded Sunday was not going to be easy. The Gladys with the sore hips and knees would have suffered painfully trying to get through the throng. But, full of emotional energy, and with freely functioning legs, Gladys set upon her quest to find Jim Heskett and tell him what Jesus had on his mind.

  For this mission, it was fortunate that Jim Heskett didn’t stand at the front door of the building shaking hands, as did the successive pastors of Gladys’s childhood church. Instead, he casually answered questions and shook hands near the coffee bar. A few of the church elders usually accompanied him there, to dissipate the pressure on him, as they fielded some of the congregation’s questions. Though it was a high attendance week, his lackluster performance during the sermon slackened the press to greet the pastor that Sunday.

  Gladys stood waiting for Jim to finish a conversation with a couple that she didn’t recognize. When she was sure no one was looking at her, she asked Jesus furtively. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to tell him that I have given him all that he needs, to see and hear me clearly. I am always with him. He just has to look among the crates of treasure that he has stored away in the warehouse inside his soul.”

  Gladys grimaced visibly. She started to critique Jesus’s message, but was cut off by the pastor ending his conversation and turning to her preemptively.

  “Gladys, so good to see you, and looking quite well,” Jim said.

  “Thank you, Pastor. I am feeling very well,” she said, and then she cleared her throat, as a delay tactic. She looked up into the bright young face of her pastor and almost surrendered her plan.

  Jesus encouraged her briefly. “Go ahead, Gladdy, he’ll know what it means.”

  “I have a message from the person I told you was visiting me these days,” she said, conscious of the crowd within earshot.

  Jim looked around and guessed that Gladys didn’t feel comfortable sharing her epiphany with everyone. He certainly understood that, and was actually grateful. He didn’t want to answer questions about it either.

  “A message?” he said, his voice lower now.

  Gladys looked into his light blue eyes and tried to reconstruct what Jesus had told her. “He says that he has given you all that you need to be able to see him and to be close to him, but you have to look in the crates of the treasures you have stored away in your warehouse,” she said, as accurately as she could.

  Jim tipped his head, and looked, to Gladys, like he might suddenly be nauseous. “Okay,” he said, his voice tight and truncated. “I’ll have to think about that.” And the encounter was over, as the next church member pressed in to greet the pastor.

  That response was very dissatisfying to Gladys, but Jesus calmed her with assurances.

  “He heard you, and he will think about it, and remember things he has experienced in the past. It was well worth it, believe me.”

  It wasn’t until Jim got in his car, nearly a half hour later—Charlotte having taken her car home to get dinner ready—that he had time to absorb what Gladys had said.

  That sick look on his face came from a quick connection between the image in Gladys’s message and his favorite movie as a kid. Jim loved the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Gladys’s mention of a warehouse full of crates immediately drew to mind the final scene of that movie, where a low-level government official is wheeling a crate, bearing the lost Ark of the Covenant, into a government facility. The man rolls his load down one corridor and turns down another, winding as if through a maze. Then he places the crate in a wall of very similar crates. The camera then pulls back, and reveals that the wall of crates is just one among many large walls in a massive warehouse full of crates that all look the same.

  All that, flashed across his mind for a second, and then Jim had to be the stable and affable pastor again. As he drove home, he thought about that image in the context of Jesus�
��s message through Gladys. First, he felt that the warehouse and crate image added credibility to Gladys’s claim that the message came from Jesus. Gladys could not have known what that image meant to Jim, with its childhood roots.

  Additionally, he felt an inner burning around the notion that the Ark of the Covenant represented the presence of God, which he, of course, believed he had inside him, by virtue of his acceptance of Christ’s salvation. Apparently, Jesus was saying that, all Jim needed for the closeness he craves with God is already in him, only buried among thousands of other things which obscure that life-giving presence.

  Though Gladys couldn’t have known it, and Jesus had not explicitly referred to the storehouse in Raiders, that was the primary impact Jim took with him from that message. He could picture the Spirit of God as this hugely powerful force stowed in a crate, and buried under thousands of other crates, none of which contained anything with real power. And now, Jim just had to figure out what was in those other crates and what to do about their accumulation.

  For Gladys, on the other hand, the ride home had been another chance to simply relish the fact of Jesus riding in her old car, humming that closing song from the worship service. Gladys joined him and they hummed all the way home.

  Chapter 16

  BELLS

  Gladys and Jesus passed a very relaxing and agreeable Sunday together, even returning to watching those same TV programs they saw the Sunday before. Relaxed didn’t mean, however, that the significance and power of Jesus’s visit was laid aside, or that Gladys took him for granted. She was having the time of her life. She even thought that this was what a marriage should look like, two people loving each other, kind to each other, patient with each other, and completely free to say whatever came to mind.

  Just before bed, Gladys heard the bells at the Catholic church ring nine o’clock, audible after she turned off the TV. She smiled.

  “Bells have always made me feel happy,” she said, still sitting in the love seat, looking now at Jesus, instead of the TV.

  “Do you remember the first Christmas you and Harry were married?” Jesus slipped this question in as a response to her mention of bells, but the way he called up that memory invoked expectations of more than a simple glimpse at the past.

  “We were living in Lincoln, that first year, before he got his first job up by Chicago,” Gladys said.

  Though Lincoln, Nebraska, in the late 1950s, was the state capitol and the home of the University of Nebraska, it still projected the attitude of a sprouting suburb, in some parts, and a frontier town, in others. The football team had not yet become a national powerhouse, and the city had barely more than a hundred thousand residents. But, for Harry and Gladys, it was a big city. Their point of reference, of course, was Fairbury, which had peaked at around sixty-four hundred before they moved away. Red brick roads near the University reminded them of home, but the towering capitol building, and sprawling University campus, had no analogy in their experience.

  Harry worked as a junior car salesman at a small used car lot on the west side of town. They lived in an apartment above a downtown bakery, just seven blocks from the University campus. Gladys worked cleaning houses on the wealthier east side of town, a neighborhood called Piedmont. She rode a city bus to work each day. Harry usually walked, if the weather was fair. Their days were measured by the sound of the bells from the Mueller Tower on campus. To Gladys, those bells sounded magical. She had heard church bells before, of course, but these were electronically enhanced, and chimed more than the simple dull counting of the hours. They played songs, at each hour and at about twenty past each hour.

  Not one to investigate the technical details, Gladys preferred to think that someone was playing those songs manually, which was generally not the case. She also liked to think that those bells rang their bright and cheerful tunes just for her. It was a childish thought, of course, one that the twenty-year-old dared not tell anyone, not even Harry. He had little tolerance for silly fantasies.

  Jesus’s voice stirred her memories some more. “Remember the Christmas songs on the bells from the University?”

  Gladys chuckled. They had a sparse first Christmas, living on an uneven, and paltry, income from Harry’s sales job, and the pittance Gladys made from house cleaning, working for a man who took a significant share of what the girls earned each day. But, along with their skinny little tree, and simple popcorn and cranberry decorations, they had music piped in twice an hour. Gladys gloried in how much better she could hear those songs, in her little apartment, than could the lawyers and doctors living in the big houses in Piedmont.

  Her memory of that Christmas focused on to two days before the holiday, their last day in Lincoln before driving home to her father’s farm, to celebrate with Gladys’s family. Harry’s father had died the previous year, and his mother had sold the house in Fairbury, and moved to Scotts Bluff, to live with her sister. That last night in Lincoln would be their Christmas, for just the two of them. Gladys had bought Harry a new tie to spruce up his old gray or blue suit that he wore at the car lot. She knew that, even in cold weather, customers could still see his tie peeking out from jacket and coat, and even a scarf loosely wrapped. She bought the tie at Gold’s Department store, splurging a week’s wages on it.

  With plans for a cozy and romantic evening, just the two of them, Gladys sat waiting in the apartment at five o’clock, expecting Harry home any minute. The car lot was closed for the holidays, and they had talked about having their own little private celebration that night. But Harry didn’t show up. Gladys waited for hours.

  She blew out the candles before they melted away entirely. She ate part of the small pot roast, with potatoes and gravy, and perched by the window. After supper, she sat looking at the colored lights around the drug store windows across the street, illuminating the sidewalk, where snow had highlighted the lines in the pavement, but had not really begun to pile up yet that year.

  There, alone, Gladys heard the bells at eight o’clock play, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, and she cried.

  Back in the present, Gladys swiped away a single tear. “Why did you make me remember that part?”

  “You never forgave Harry for that,” Jesus said simply.

  Gladys took in a big breath and remembered the way Harry came home, past nine o’clock, four hours late. He smelled of alcohol and spoke with a thick tongue and loose lips. “Oh, sorry, Gladdy,” he had said. “You know how it is. The boys wanted to celebrate the last night of work before Christmas and all, you know.” He eyed the leftover dinner in the little ice box, leaning on the door in the pale light, too tired and too drunk to even pull the food out and make a late supper for himself.

  Gladys hastily threw something together for him to eat, but he was too inebriated to feel the punishment in her brusque movements and silent stares. Finally, frustrated with his lack of attention to her, even now that he was four hours late, she said something she regretted later.

  “You know, just because your father’s dead doesn’t mean he doesn’t see what you’re doing.” She said this with unusual acerbic force.

  Harry’s father had been a strict Presbyterian, who forbade the use of alcohol for any purpose. Harry never let his dad catch him with alcohol on his breath. But now, his father was dead, and Gladys drove that point home to hurt him. And it did.

  As she remembered it in her living room, with Jesus rocking slowly in Harry’s chair, Harry actually cried that night, something he rarely did, especially if he was sober. He missed his father and, perhaps, also hated him at times. Gladys was sorry for making Harry cry, but she didn’t bother to apologize to her sloppy drunk husband that night. She just went to bed, leaving him to eat his cold dinner and cry himself to sleep at the kitchen table.

  Gladys sniffled and nodded her head. She was working up the momentum to forgive her husband, now that he was deceased over four years.

  “Is it too late?”

  “Too late for Harry, of course,” Jesus said. “But
not too late for you.”

  “I have to forgive him, for me?”

  Jesus stopped rocking. “Carrying the weight of unforgiveness can wear on your joints, can deaden your soul and dull your mind. You owe it to yourself to drop that burden.”

  Put that way, Gladys wondered why she hadn’t done it already. “Okay, I want to forgive him,” she said, checking to see if that was enough. Jesus didn’t yet seem satisfied, his head cocked to one side slightly and one eye brow raised.

  She tried again. “I do. I do forgive him. I let go of the burden of not forgiving him.”

  Then Jesus did something that Gladys didn’t expect. He leaned forward in his chair and blew at her. “Receive freedom from that burden,” he said, with the force of a royal pronouncement.

  At first, Gladys straightened in her seat, then she sat up still straighter, arching her back and looking down at her hands. She started to flex her fingers. “Hey, my hands feel better. How did that happen?”

  “I told you that carrying unforgiveness weighs on your joints. I healed your hips and knees already, but your hands still showed the effects of that long journey, with such heavy baggage.”

  Just as Gladys was about to relax again, she stopped and looked at Jesus with her eyebrows curled downward. “Wait. My hips and knees were sore because of this? How is it you healed them first?”

  “Grace, my Dear. Grace and mercy.”

  Those religiously familiar words took on new impact for Gladys in that moment, filled in with meaning, instead of floating by with the hollow churchy sound they carried for her before. It wasn’t that she, or her church, had rejected grace and mercy; it was just that the words had simply stayed in place after the meaning had leaked away, from lack of use and from inadequate understanding.